23 Intently Staring Goalies

NHL Vice President Colin Campbell told The Times that executives working in the league's situation room in Toronto saw the play but were constrained by the lack of a rule that would allow them to look at it.

"Wish we could get involved but this is unreviewable. We are not allowed to get involved," he said....

"They could see the puck when Dwight King covered it with his hand. They couldn't see it when it went over the barn and came back in," Sutter said, referring to a penalty called on King at 18:15 of the third period for closing his hand on the puck. "If there wasn't a net there, they could have caught it and threw it back in and scored and they still had time when nobody would have saw it.

"What are they going to do at the outdoor game? What happens if it goes through a cumulus cloud and comes back down?"...

Such as illogical rules. Sutter was asked whether this incident might prompt a change that would make that situation reviewable. "You'd have to talk to one of them stewards of the game," he said in a tone drenched with sarcasm.

The Chicago Blackhawks announced today that they have acquired goaltender Jason LaBarbera from the Edmonton Oilers, in exchange for future considerations. LaBarbera will be assigned to the Rockford IceHogs of the American Hockey League.

LaBarbera, 33, has appeared in seven games this season with Edmonton, posting a 1-3-0 record with a 3.28 goals-against average and a .870 save percentage. He has also earned a 0-1-1 record with a 1.93 goals-against average and a .953 save percentage in two appearances with the Oklahoma City Barons of the AHL.

Looks like Corey Crawford's injury is worse than first reported. Crawford didn't make the trip to Dallas with the team, and at this morning's press conference, Quenneville stated that Crawford will be out for about three weeks.

From Chris Kuc at the Chicago Tribune:

#Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville said goaltender Corey Crawford will be sidelined about three weeks with injury.

Marek Mazanec, who started out this season as the backup goaltender for the Nashville Predators, has been named the NHL rookie of the month for November. Mzanec has been carrying the goatending load for the Predators after Pekka Rinne was sidelined due to an infection related to an earlier hip injury.

Nashville Predators goaltender Marek Mazanec, who posted a 5-4-1 record with a 2.00 goals-against average, .932 save percentage and two shutouts in 11 appearances, has been named the NHL Rookie of the Month for November.

The Edmonton Oilers recalled goalie Jason LaBarbera from the Oklahoma City Barons of the American Hockey League on Monday. To make room for LaBarbera, defenseman Corey Potter was assigned to the Oilers' farm club.

LaBarbera was summoned a day after goalie Ilya Bryzgalov left the game in Dallas with an upper-body injury caused by a collision with Dallas Stars center Ryan Garbutt.

Signed to a one-year contract by the Oilers Nov. 8 and called up Nov. 17 after a conditioning stint with Oklahoma City, Bryzgalov is 1-1-0 with a 2.11 goals-against average and .939 save percentage in four games (three starts).

"Bryzgalov took a hard hit [Sunday]," coach Dallas Eakins told the Oilers website after practice Monday. "He's being assessed as we speak to see where he's at. We'll know later in the day."

This past Summer, I kept looking at the Panthers lineup and wondered what they were going to do with their goaltending. After they let Jose Theodore go, I expected something to happen, whether it was trading for a goaltender, or finding another goalie in Europe to add to the mix.

Even after Dale Tallon signed Tim Thomas, it still felt like the Panthers were looking for a more permanent solution.

Dr Daniel Garza didn't play hockey, and he wasn't an NHL team physician. But because of his work, a lot more NHL players and hockey players in general, won't be suffering from brain injuries. His work in the area of traumatic brain injuries and concussions contributed to the understanding of how head injuries happen in sports, and more importantly, how to prevent them.

Let's say you're looking for some diamonds, and you're given a nice big, plug of rough. Your job--figuring out if there's a diamond in the rough that's going to be good enough for your trouble.

You examine the rough, wash it down, and hmmm. Okay, some demantoid garnets. Nice, but not what you're looking for. But you can sell them on another market, so they get put aside. There's some industrial grade crystals, and they go into another pile.

You find a couple of possibilities in the mix, so now it's time to get to work. You clean them up and inspect further. No visible flaws and no occlusions, so it's time to hand them over to the cutter to see what the final product is going to be.

Here's where it gets fun. You're depending on the cutter knowing their stuff. A mediocre cutter may get lucky, but they'll likely create a mediocre diamond--too shallow, or the table isn't in proper proportion, or worse, the diamond shatters, leaving you with more to sadly put into the industrial pile.

If the cutter is excellent, you get a diamond that's large, brilliant, and just the right shade of blue-white.

If you're really lucky, you get a pink diamond, and then you open up the champagne, because life is about to become very, very, good.

Sometimes the story is that there's no story. In the case of the Carolina Hurricanes, what's curiously and rather cheerily missing is the story about a goalie controversy.

Yay!

With so many goaltenders in the NHL either playing 70 games in a regular season, or thinking they ought to play at least 70 games, any back-up who is isn't taking the part of gate-opener and trivia answer suddenly becomes the focus of a media-generated controversy. That's when you watch an interview of the winning goalie start out with a question about the other goalie, as if the game that evening wasn't news enough.

About 23 Intently Staring Goalies

23 Intently Staring Goalies comes from the 23 close-up photos of goalies that used to line the walls of my office.

On the good side, it kept down interruptions, but it also made sure I had to leave my trash outside my door if I wanted it picked up.

I've been watching and analyzing goaltenders for going on 40 years. Some of that was spent drawing goalies on my grade 8 math homework. Then it was taking my card decks and printouts to Indianapolis Racer games. Luckily, the Internet took off, and by 1991 I was half of the duo that would ultimately become the Plaidworks hockey mailing lists. I wrote "Handicapping the Goalies' for the San Jose Sharks mailing list, and took a lot of photos of goalies in action. I have around 5000 slides of mostly goaltenders in action from 1989 through 2001 from the WHL, IHL and NHL. Since I've gone digital, I've added about 10,000 more images to the library. During summers and when the league went dark, I was reading through multiple SF By area news papers, tracking ice hockey from the 1917 recreational leagues up through the California Seals.

We'll be talking about goalies and goaltending. We'll talk about whats going on now, who's in the system, and when the doldrums hit, I'll haul something out of the big bag of history, or something from the photo archives. We'll talk about who's hot and why, and who's not and what they can do to get back on track. We'll take a look at the trends in scouting goalies, and why a style may work for one team but not another. I'll battle with my dictation software to get it to understand Bryzgalov and Bobrovsky.